Outliers:The Story of Success is an amazing and a very profound book. On the one hand the argument is simple and easy for anyone to see and understand. Standard issue Nature vs Nurture stuff-if you do something often enough, say ten thousand hours, than you are more likely to be good at that something than someone who merely does for, say seven thousand hours. The interesting bit is that he tosses out Nature altogether and tells us flatly that it is all 100% nurture.
I remember being great inspired after I read Think and Grow Rich-one of the original self-help/self-made-man books. Painfully dated with it’s stories of Great Men we now consider Robber Barons and the owners of countless Monopolies. Ah those were the good old days. The trouble with Think and Grow Rich, of course, is that I didn’t grow rich from thinking.
Outliers takes the idea of the Self Made Man and gives it a more real world twist. The great success of the world are great successes not because of some innate talent, but because they had the good fortune to put in enough Practice to become great while those around them did not. Tiger Woods and The Williams Sister spring to mind here-the early examples given in Outliers are The Beatles, Bill Gates, and Bill Joy. Practice, and lots of it, is what made them so great.
There is a lot of being in the right place at the right time in Outliers. A lot of talk about how the month you are born into determines how well you will do in certain sports and how having access to the right equipment leads to success in a given field. Again, there is a wonderful common sense feel to this. You will not become a great Cello Player if you never take up the Cello. But also, you will never become a Great Cello player if you don’t play it for at least ten thousand hours.
Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers is filled with geewhiz moments that prove his point. Of course, not everyone spends their 10,000 hours on things that will make them rich and not everyone is born at the right time and in the right place to make the most of their studies.
My own ten thousand hours have been spent in two useful fields and several not so useful fields. I have been writing for a lot longer than ten thousand hours, but I still have not managed to get that best seller over the transom. I have also spent a good ten thousand hours taking portraits, reading about how to take portraits, and studying the works of the masters. But I don’t live in Hollywood or New York and my chances of snapping portraits of the beautiful and famous are somewhat slim. I am a pretty good portrait photographer now, for all the good it does me.
Now on to the not so good. I have watched tens of thousands of hours of television and played at least a few thousand hours of video games. It’s possible I could crank out a script or two for the Syfy channel, they don’t even seem all that particular, but I never have. I’ve never even looked into getting a job as a reviewer for so much as a throw away weekly-as my skill set of having seen a gazaillion hours of TV is nothing unusual. And I am way too long in the tooth for the Gaming Industry-though I do think I could write a fairly decent Adventure game.
In short, I was born to the wrong parents at the wrong time. I couldn’t afford private lessons and I never practiced as much as I should have on my violin. I took up the bicycle too late to make Racing a career. And I gave up on getting published at exactly the wrong time. So that I have now drifted through life and squandered all those tens of thousands of hours.
I still have a few hours left, maybe it’s time to get back to work on that Best Seller.
